Charles Hoskinson Steemit AMA

You've stated previously that you would hire 3 full-time developers to work on Ethereum Classic. Has that happened yet?

The development roadmap needs to be resolved first in order to determine the business and technical requirements of the development team. This said, we have already internally started the hiring process and will post some ads on the ethereum classic reddit alongside other sources. Expect the first hire by early September.

Can you share your vision for ETC?

Nice to see you here!

In addition to planning to hire full-time devs, are you planning to bring on board an evangelist to pitch ETC to startups?

ETC - Is it possible to have a future direction/decision process without relying on consensus or the crowd, as for me it just stagnates progress.

wicked dude, your the reason i heard about ethereum all those years back. Welcome to the most amazing community here on steemit.

Whats your main reason for getting behind Ethereum classic now?

Do you feel that the DAO fiasco has done irreparable harm to smart contracts?

How long do you think it will take before APPS are introduced on Lisk. Secondly where do you see them in 3 to 5 years time. Great to see you here answering questions.

Jesus of Ethereum!!!

How valid is the argument that ETC remains an immutable platform; and that, ETH will suffer because of the hard fork rolling back transactions?

if you had to explain to a child of the future what we are doing now with cryptocurrencies how can you explain it to him? 8]

What's your top 5 crypto's at the moment?

How will we clean up all the dead or dying coins, or will these coins stay around for good? ...proof-of-burn perhaps, like some have proposed?

Do you plan to fight the Ethereum Foundation to recover the ETC equivalent of the development fund? As highlighted by Barry Silbert, the Foundation had no business taking a side in the debate since they have been funded and are still financing their operations using the crowdsale proceeds that where meant to support the development of a chain deemed "immutable" and "censorship resistant" in the crowdsale prospectus. I think the Foundation's decision to support the hardfork/bailout and reject the original chain they have been paid to develop is extremely questionable, and possibly ground for legal action given the fact it can be trivially proven that there was no actual problem with Ethereum itself. Given the circumstances, I think they are not in a position to refuse, at the very minimum, to release the split ETC funds that correspond 1:1 on the ETC chain to the remaining crowdsale funds. These funds could be used to fund developments by a new foundation on ETC.

Why did you add a #bitshares tag even though you left the bisharestalk community months ago? Planning a comeback?

I am a founder of Bitshares and I'm willing to answer Bitshares questions.

Do you see potential as to the extent Steemit can grow?

Are you helping LISK deploy secure sandboxes for dApps?

Where do you see LISK in six months and how do you feel about their current progress. Will your company get involved with any of the technical developments in the future, should you be asked?

Also, thanks for doing this AMA

which three cryptocurrencies have the brightest future and why?

What are your thoughts on the Peerplay event. I am buying some Bitshares.

Charles, I'd just like to thank you for your good work on various projects in the crypto space these last few years. I was too prickly when you posted in the BitShares forum. And I failed to recognize how unselfish the bulk of your work has been. For that, I apologize.

Since then, I have watched some of your videos and gained a better understanding of your work and the choices that you have made. I do not think that Ethereum, BitShares, or even Steemit would be where they are today without the foundational groundwork you have done.

It's great to see you posting on Steemit and I hope you do so regularly. I will always welcome your experience and perspective. -Tom @donkeypong

Following your visit on Dash slack public channel.
Can you share with us, what do you think about Dash and his governance system?

"I'll answer at least the top 20 after one week."

That's normally not the way AMAs work -- much better when they're interactive and you're answering questions live.

Me gusta lo que publicaste, visita mi blogg y si te gusta vota gracias

It's Sunday and I didn't give a lot of notice so I figured let's try a slightly longer time period. Besides this is a steemit ama notna reddit one :)

I have a basic question regarding bitcoin. If market cap of bitcoin is only 10 billion, and we are seeing many fin tech and block chain start up projects started. Most of these start up projects are originally funded with bit coin and their valuations are priced in bit coin. Wouldn't you expect the market cap of bit coin to valued much higher based on what can be seen as a tech boom in blockchain companies? My questions is then, what is a fair valuation for bit coin price based on simply the number of start up projects that are in place so far in 2016?

What, if anything, would be your 'nope' moment with ETC? As you have stated, your interest is mostly academic in the development of ETC, so is there anything the community could do that would turn you or your investment in human capital away from etc?

If there is one truth all individuals in cryptoland can agree on---it is that the cryptoverse is one wherein we all say and do things from time to time that we would do differently "if we only had known".
:)

What are your thoughts on DPOS? Do you believe it is gaining traction in the circles in which you speak?
I understand Lisk is a project you are working with. Is there any cool news on that front?

And how do you see a "Committee" that token holders vote into and out of power based (like what bitshares has) differ from the Ethereum Foundation who cannot be fired by holders of the token?

i kind of like that it was done this way honestly...and the fact that you will be participating for days after the first payout is a nice gesture :)

My twitter feed keeps telling me that I should follow you? Why is it saying that? I want answers!

What exactly do you intend to develop for ETC? Clients? Infrastructure like block exlorer? What do you say to people that are unhappy with the fork, but otherwise happy with the development work of the foundation -- people that are sceptical of anyone else taking charge of development on the original chain?

Hi Charles, Kris here. I met you at a Bitcoin meetup in Tampa last summer. I have a two-part question: What does your senior advisor role consist of for Lisk? Also, is a javascript really that big of a deal for Lisk, and is it only because Solidity is a new language for Eth? Thanks! Upvoted and followed.

Hi Charles. What's the most important thing that you've learned In your life so far?

You've stated that you own neither eth or etc. May I ask, might this change?

Do you keep the cap off your sharpie for long periods of time? :) Welcome to Steemit.
I would also ask if you think you will be able to recover development funds from the ETH foundation for ETC or not? Do you know for a fact the ETH foundation is currently holding ETC? What is it you like about Steemit, and what do you think should be improved?
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/4be92dbb-278a-4bda-87ef-683a03fa13da_1.48f86041e498000ec3dbe8372981a011.jpeg

What does it say on that piece of paper you're holding?

I haven't been following it much. I've heard there is still some interest in the community and Bitshares seems to continue to be traded and has tangible value. In 2017, I'll likely do a Bitshares project and it would probably involve a sharedrop from protoshares, but too early to tell.

Tom. thanks for the kind words and I have to admit that my personal PR has been pretty terrible throughout the last 24 months and I'll try to make it better. I didn't realize how great of a community has formed around a lot of the projects I've been fortunate to be a part of and in the future I'm going to make an effort to reach out more.

True that fuzz. I think that applies to both of us throughout our interactions.

First, I wrote the message with a regular pen instead of a sharpie. In the future, I'll use a sharpie and probably a cool color like purple.

Second, I will not advocate taking ETC from the foundation and reallocating it somewhere else. They are the rightful owners of those funds and can do whatever they want with them. It frankly isn't my concern.

Third, I have no clue if the foundation has liquidated their ETC or held it. I assume they currently have some, but I have no idea.

Finally, Steemit is an interesting concept. I'm not sure I'm sold on the economics- in particular the incentive to buy Steem. But I do like any attempt to change the reddit model, fund content creation, deal with spam more productively and prevent censorship of voices.

I will not advocate for the ETH Foundation to send ETC to whatever governance structure ETC forms. This is their money and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. ETC doesn't need their talent or funds to succeed. It will succeed on its own merits and with a stronger, more principled community tirelessly working towards the original vision.

The system works. The ETH Foundation made a decision to fork and some subset of the community effectively fired them. I mentioned this possibility back in January of 2014 in a debate with Dan Larimer and David Johnston. It has come to pass.

I think ETC has an opportunity to come up with a more effective governance structure and one that produces far less drama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9miCOsg4g

Two that are unreleased, ETC, Dash and Lisk currently interest me the most. I also am following Zcash closely, rootstock and several other projects.

Did you happen to steal some architectural stuff (for Bitshares) from one of the people you met in a certain conference?

The same way someone would explain a child of today the internet from 1991. You start with the first principles of the system. Cryptocurrencies represent a fundamental change in how value is accounted, moved, transformed, earned and legally encumbered. The end goal is to promote a system that is censorship resistant, transparent, inclusive, accountable, corruption free and self-evolving. Furthermore, if it's successful, then like the internet that preceded it, the system should become ubiquitous. It's a standard that flows across every part of the social experience of commerce and relationships.

To a child, like children with iPads today, we know the system has succeed if they accept it as they would a book or a toy. It is and one cannot imagine a time when it wasn't even if they lived it.

What's a "cryptocoin"?


Did he just ask what's a battle?
http://17rg073sukbm1lmjk9jrehb643.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Screen-Shot-2014-08-09-at-10.36.42-PM.png
Kidding. Welcome aboard!

First, I'm not sure if your question is quite accurate. Many of the startups in the blockchain space have been funded from VC capital that came from fiat. Second, they occupy a bet on the technology and its overall profitability, not necessarily the particular implementation that is Bitcoin. For example, Ripple Labs isn't connected to Bitcoin and could survive without it.

In terms of a fair price, I think you need to examine the total population, how engaged they are, the merchant adoption, custom infrastructure such as hardware wallets and atms, the rate of evolution of the underlying protocol and how resilient the system is to negative events. With these factors in minds, Bitcoin looks fairly attractive and I suspect will continue to grow at a nice pace. Whether it obtains a value on scale with gold or other value store commodities is difficult to say, but that's what makes it fun.

We are planning on hiring a community manager and an education director in addition to the devs. I'd like for these hires to be turned over to the governance structure of ETC once that has been established.

You all have been very friendly and far better than reddit, which has been an utter toxic mess. Thank you for the kindness and warmth.

The good dictator question. Yes, I freely admit that if you have an excellent and deeply empowered leader, then your movement has the potential to accomplish great things; however, you are effectively betting the house on the brilliant and character of one person or a small group of strongmen. This bet is never sustainable historically. Either the leader dies, retires or gets corrupted.

Therefore, it makes sense to invest time and resources into a governance structure that is in some way anchored with checks and balances. The challenge is always how do you execute in a very competitive environment with these measures slowly down your agility, ability to adapt and decisive decision making?

I'd argue that for cryptocurrencies with billions of dollars at stake of token value and infrastructure, it is actually imperative that a disciplined and deliberate process be taken. I'd also argue that you need to have solid principles and a well understood social contract embedded into your decision making process. These requirements don't necessarily infer that you cannot be agile or adaptive. Rather, they simply have such an effort orders of magnitude more difficult and imperfect at best.

There is some really good literature on the topic: https://falkvinge.net/files/2013/04/Swarmwise-2013-by-Rick-Falkvinge-v1.1-2013Sep01.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starfish_and_the_Spider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy as examples. For ETC and other cryptocurrencies, I'd love to see some adoption of these ideas as a further differentiator to the cult of personality, centralized leadership some cryptocurrencies currently enjoy.

I think it is far more important for Lisk to spend some serious time examining the entire design of their protocol, make some necessary changes, fully document everything and then have a long conversation with the DApp community about the types of applications they want to write and where the experience is lacking.

I think this process can be started and finished by the end of 2016. With respect to the next step of encouraging application development, I'd like to see Lisk become a marketplace for DApp services with delegates as the service providers. The idea would be to augment existing infrastructure and software to enjoy a newly federated or decentralized component. For example, user accounts could be stored encrypted with hashed lookups on a sidechain secured by delegates. This would give the application a tamper resistant, but secure user DB.

These kind of hybrid experiences seem to be natural fit for where Lisk could position itself. Basically it would be saying let's make all this really cool tech in the blockchain space available in a federated flavor to application developers to be consumed in modular bites with marketplace mechanics backing it.

I am unhappy with the current progress of Lisk and this stems from the small size of the core tech, their limited resources and the poor execution by the legal consultants in getting a business structure setup. This said, it seems the worst is over and they are now centralized in Berlin, the ggmbh is in process and they will soon have access to their trust funds from what I've been told.

Given this newfound momentum, Lisk needs to start hiring. They need 3-5 more talented developers localized in Berlin. They need a cryptographer on staff to review and enhance their existing protocol. They need more community management staff. They also need someone to worry about DevEx on the team while they plan their SDK.

The good news is that they should be funded to accommodate their needs and I have also connected Max and Oliver to my extensive rolodex of contacts. If they want to hire and execute, then they should be able to do so. It's up to the Lisk community to hold them accountable.

As for IOHK getting involved, it is too early to tell. We'll circle back in a few months.

I will never buy ETH. I do not believe in the team behind it, the increasingly toxic community that's developing and also the lack of philosophical commitment of the protocol. If given ETH, then I will sell it for bitcoin.

As for ETC, I'd love to earn some for doing work. That's the best way of getting a cryptocurrency.

I believed in the original social contract of Ethereum. This contract has been abandoned by the EF. I've returned to try to prevent ETC from dying. I'd like to see the currency and community become self-sufficient and unified behind immutability.

It's valid as long as the community actually does it. There seems to be a strong and passionate group of people who really do care about things like immutability and I don't think this will change.

I think ETH will not suffer from rolling back transactions. Rather I feel rolling back is a symptom of a pervasive belief amongst the EF, its developers and many in their community that they are cryptophilosopher kings. And I feel that this attitude will result in stunting their growth.

They have a roadmap with more than five hard forks in about two years. They don't seem to communicate well with the outside. And the meritocracy of Ethereum seems to be built on a person's ability to write code.

It just doesn't sit well with me. I bet on systems that don't dehumanize people who decided that maybe they shouldn't be developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOjlvwfREtw

Not at the moment, this task is extremely involved and is beyond the scope of my engagement as a non-fiduciary advisor.

Cryptocurrencies in general are quite difficult to kill and seem to be the digital equivalent of space junk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris. Proof of burn would be a novel way of cleaning up a ledger. With a smart contracting system like Ethereum, you could also issue a token to be used in the burn contract to cover the set who have lost their tokens. There's honestly a lot of flexibility and it more depends on exactly what your goal happens to be.

I think proof of burn is most effective when one wants to change the social contract of the system. It's the ultimate form of consent because you are forever destroying your ownership in one system for another.

You said it man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euaxoe4XMls

We have a PoS algorithm coming out within the next day or two that we will extend to a DPoS scheme that is provably secure. DPoS still suffers from lack of incentives modeling for both participation of the voters and the delegates themselves. The next generation will need to more formally address these concerns.

With respect to its quality as an algorithm, the idea has been around for awhile under the term dynamic quorum paxos. The novelty has been using a PoS scheme to select the quorum. Lisk does use DPoS and would be the first candidate for potential improvements moving forward.

Steemit is pretty cool. I'd love to see it grow if I could ever wrap my head around the economics of it.

Este es mi ama . ¿Cuál es tu pregunta?

Thank you for all the honest answers.

Being fired from something you dearly love profoundly changes you. Whether it's for the better or results in you becoming a bitter angry man is totally up to you. Learn to love people. Learn to forgive people. And always remember your principles even when they are inconvenient. Also never forget the people who love you back.

This is my steemit ama

Twitter is programmed to introduce you to awesome, super amazing people.

That one is on Dan if it happened because most of the stuff came after me. I'm sure Bitshares had a lot of inspiration as did Ethereum and Bitcoin itself. Stealing is a strong word especially considering almost all of these ideas are open source.

I think that is it logically inconsistent to be happy with the work of the foundation, but reject their fork. They have philosophically stated that the social contract of ethereum is mutable and they are free to change it at any time. There simply is too much risk in deploying infrastructure when this approach is being taken.

IOHK will suggest a new roadmap with the support and guidance of the ETC community, conduct research to accommodate it and implement full clients and whatever other infrastructure is required to run these changes. I fully admit and understand that some subset of the ETC community will not accept any roadmap we proposal for whatever personal reason. So we'll do our best to try to curate a process that reflects the will of the bulk of the community given respect to the core principles that brought us all here in the first place such as immutability.

I am a non-fiduciary advisor. This means I don't make decisions about the money nor am I responsible for daily operations. I act much like a VC investor would to the project by connecting Max and Oliver to my network, offering advice on problems and trying to meet with them on a weekly basis.

Javascript is not a big deal to be honest. It's more about the model of making it easy and understandable for application developers to integrate blockchain based features into their software without having to design a cryptocurrency or necessarily learn new technology. To this end, it would be nice to do this in PHP, Ruby, Python and other languages as well and if the platform is popular this will naturally happen. More relevant is the marketplace model and the effectiveness of the underlying protocols. That's the first challenge for Lisk to overcome.

I really love what I've seen so far and it's really exciting to see the core developers being paid from the system itself. I've assigned an internal team to do a deeper due diligence on the technology and economics of Dash.

I think it has pointed out that smart contracts live in a subset of applications called high assurance software and are not toy scripts to be run by part time hackers. Moving forward, there needs to be a very serious conversation about how to leverage decades of techniques developed for high assurance software for smart contracts. I think ETC is in a great position to be a leader in that conversation.

This is a great question. If the ETC community fragments into hundreds of pieces without any vision or purpose, then there really isn't a point in investing resources into the project. If the community turns toxic and self-destructive, then I have better things to do with my time. If there is no desire to diverge from the EF's roadmap, then this would be another nope moment.

From what I've seen so far, people have been very friendly, supportive, honest and passionate. I like the ETC community and I enjoy interacting with them. So no nope moments so far.

The ones I build :)

Thanks for the reply. So our digital junk will be much easier to clean up, if we want to, than all that planet-orbiting physical junk.

This is their money

To be precise, this is our money, and among other things my money. What would you say if Lisk developers made a runner with the development funds, spawned their own fork under some arbitrary reason that had nothing to do with the network itself, and even had the gut to steal the name and collude with everyone they can find to attempt to discredit the still perfectly valid and unchanged original network?

Is it possible to kick an account off of Steemit or censor it like it is possible to on Reddit or Twitter?

At some point in life, one has to invite pragmatism. If ETC is to survive and not get bogged down in years worth of legal fights, then I feel the best path forward is to treat it as a sharedrop to all active ETH Accounts. Whatever the people do with those accounts is their affair.

I'm not the leader of nor do I desire to be a leader in the ETC community. If you want to advocate a different position, then by all means argue it. But do understand the implications of inferring ownership of ETC. It has consequences beyond the foundation.

Ethereum BitShares and steemit ,the biggest difference in where? Excuse me,

Not my AMA, but I'd like to add that valuation depends on whether you consider Bitcoin now or after the release of the lightning network and other important sidechains like Liquid and Rootstock. This is important because Bitcoin now and then are totally different things. Today's Bitcoin has pretty much hit its maximum capacity and can't scale to become a mainstream payment network. All it can do is improve in quality and security, which is its strong selling point right now. Today's Bitcoin is fairly valued at 10B USD IMO. Tomorrow's Bitcoin is a totally different thing: with Lightining it becomes a potential competitor of global realtime payment network like Visa and Amex, with Liquid it becomes a settlement backbone like SWIFT, and with Rootstock it becomes a direct competitor of Ethereum. It also ceases having scalability issues since on-chain traffic becomes almost exclusively dedicated to large transactions, lightning settlements and side-chains traffic. Tomorrow's Bitcoin could easily command a trillion dollars market cap.

Are you in favour of forking Bitcoin?

Thank you for your reply Charles. I continue to look forward to your work.

Here's a good interview to listen to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJX3JRt577A

No idea

One is a toolbox. One is a specialized tool. One is a public whiteboard with a tipjar

depends on the fork

Hi Charles, thanks for doing this. Technically speaking, is there any difference between BitShares and Ripple ?

It is more accurate to say that ETH is a sharedrop to ETC accounts. It is completely illogical to claim that an unforked chain that has continued in a linear fashion using unchanged code is a sharedrop.

Nevertheless pragmatism or other factors may still support a decision not to fight over the foundation funds.

In light of this perspective I'm curious why you choose to describe ETC as a sharedrop. To me it seems to play into the rhetoric that continues to try to frame ETC as a rogue or illegitimate fork/project. Comments?

Yes, the systems are dramatically different in both design and code. Ripple was designed as a federated model from the very beginning with the entire quorum selected by Ripple Labs and its partners. Bitshares was designed as a compromise system with decentralized stakeholders selecting a set of delegates to maintain the ledger and provide services.

Ripple is a cryptocurrency by and for banks. Bitshares was an attempt at resolving two huge problems bitcoin suffered from: value stability and centralized exchanges.

I would add that the machiavelian mentality that underlies vote brigading reddit subs, attempting to 51% the competing project, or "turning their people away" is precisely the reason that people are getting sick with the ETH community and joining ETC. ETC has Streisand effect written all over it. Literally.

That was fast, thank you.

Thanks for doing the AMA! I guess I'm less interested in what the prices of these will be as how they'll be used. I'm loving Dash for all the obvious reasons right now. Still excited to see some MVP's come out from Lisk and Rootstock. What do you envision an MVP on these platforms to look like?

I'm not personally advocating going the legal route, but the legal issue is real and the Ethereum Foundation is aware of it. They have effectively wronged a significant fraction of their investors and defaulted on multiple written commitment. I don't think they have anything to win worsening their case by refusing the one opportunity they have to prove their good faith. This can be used to negociate an orderly release of the ETC side funds.

wow awesome

Charles, thanks for doing this AMA. How do you see ethereum classic a year from now, with the impending difficulty bomb ticking away while trying to resolve with its various conflicting stakeholder interests pushing for migrating to POS or miners staying with POW?

In my opinion, BitShares would be a great success, if there was a liquid crypto exchange based on it. What is it worth to have a super fast blockchain and DEX, if nobody trades on it? Bid-ask spreads on Openledger are just ridiculous. And free capacity is huge (only 0.26
transactions per block). Could the ICOO project give a stimulus to it?

2 questions:

• what is AMA for???
• what is write on ur paper??? It is not possible to read

Good work Charles...what you are doing is awesome...this is a world where er can't make every one happy...every good is followed by some bad...we need to get through it...always room for improvement.

Awesome, and Thank You:)

Why Steemit give money to everyone.??? I know, that awesome platform, It might break Facebook or Twitter record. But what are the reasons behind the Steemit. ?? I like the idea where you post and get paid... One of my friend from Africa earned $670+, he is poor.. I am glad, my friend made it.

great information ...

HI :))
I hope you like B&W
@foxkoit

Hey Charles, as one of the brightest minds working in the crypto-currency field. I was wondering what you may think of my idea to use the Article 5 of the US Constitution to End The Federal Reserve and replace it with crypto-currencies? Blog post below:
https://steemit.com/money/@titusfrost/how-to-end-the-federal-reserve-using-article-5-of-the-u-s-constitution-and-crypto-currencies

thanks @charleshosk ! 8]

Sorry to ask a stupid question, but who are you? You haven't explained who you are here to the people who aren't big into the crypto-world

The end goal is to promote a system that is censorship resistant, transparent, inclusive, accountable, corruption free and self-evolving.

Full transparency is a huge mistake. If all of our economic lives are transparent, we lose a great deal of privacy, and with it, dignity and choices in life.

As it stands now the state already has too much control over our financial lives. If anything, crypto can help by once again reversing this back to where it belongs -- none of your damn business.

the cryptoverse is one wherein we all say and do things from time to time that we would do differently

Any public life has that pitfall. It isn't unique to the cryptoverse.

+1 on employing the terms 'machiavelian' and the 'Streisand effect'.

Either the leader dies, retires or gets corrupted.

Caesar crossed the Rubicon, then later was assassinated.

However, I will argue that everything dies. And it is better to live and die, than to not have lived. So greatness may require great leaders, but we do hope in their wake, their ideas flourish decentralized and/or institutionally.

Being fired from something you dearly love profoundly changes you. Learn to ...

...don't sell your shares in anger and get terminal pancreatic cancer after you've lead the former company back to greatness.

Who wants to trade the pegged asset, when they can trade the actual asset. I see no future for that form of a DEX.

I am very interested to read the details. When and where can I?

One is a public whiteboard with a tipjar

With a collectivized tipjar. And that distinction is essential, because without the collectivization it wouldn't work at all, but with the collectivization, the game theory and adoption metrics don't work.

Thanks.

You are nice man))Hello)

Well played! Here is the next grid
https://treebeard31.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/t2zzw.jpg

Hey Charles,

You and I met at the Toronto conference in 2014. Do you think Steemit has made a fundamental shift in the way new adopters are brought into a blockchain based ecosystem?

I mean, the fundamental barrier to entry into Bitcoin or any other crypto up to this point has been the cost. Most of my "normal" friends still don't understand why they would trade fiat for Bitcoin for any reason other than to speculate on the price of Bitcoin.

Steemit offers a different proposition - "earn free coins when you use our app". If every dapp took this approach, do you not think those dapps would attract users more quickly?

I agree with you in the sense that I don't have the economics of Steemit figured out well enough to know if it is sustainable (I've made suggestions about how to improve the network by making Steem more valuable but those have so far gone unanswered). However, perhaps the most important "innovation" behind Steemit is they gave out free coins to everyone who joined and lots of extra free coins to early adopters. Is this not a superior mechanism to grow any crypto community going forward?

If we've learned anything from the last 25 years of Internet, networks that are free to join grow faster than those that are not free. In a way, most of Bitcoin was earned early on "for free" by miners who lent their computing power. Steemit has put value on people's time instead, and in my view, this is a more attractive entry point for the 99% of people who are still not interested in crypto. Thoughts?

Smooth and Recursive pretty much nailed it.

Welcome, and great to see you on Steemit! After a few years of reading your posts I've come to the conclusion you are are obscenely intelligent. Just wanted to put it out there.

Thank you for your response. I read that Max and Oliver are planning on hiring an in-house cryptographer:

"18. The weakness of LSK is security, so team have any plans to sign strong security team? (bawga)
Oliver: We have been advised to factor out code security audits to a third party, rather than employ from within. Initially we will request an overall security audit, with follow up audits being performed after significant milestones have been achieved along the roadmap.

We are also planning to employ an in-house cryptographer whose role will be to improve and document the cryptographic elements of Lisk."

Hiring wise, they have said that they intend to start hiring some developers for key areas (security, core devs for front and backend) soon:

"Doweig: Do you have any plans on technical hirings? I mean how many tech people will you need in 6 month or 1 year from now
Max: Definitely! We made the decision to hire local talents in order to increase our efficiency (as we only have so many funds/time, and Lisk is a huge project) to the maximum.
That means starting now, after finally being in Berlin in our office, we can look for further technical employees.
We are definitely looking for 2 core devs and 2 (or more) frontend devs ASAP, but our whole team will grow to about 15 people at the end. With ASAP I mean as soon as possible to help out at urgent construction sides of Lisk."

It does look like they are starting to get things together quite a bit now and it's great that they have a decent office in Berlin to work from. For me personally, I am looking forward to them getting their GmbH status which will enable them to access the ICO funds (14K+ BTC) and start hiring some great talent.

[Sources via Lisk Blog] Lisk Community Technical Meeting Summary — August 13th

https://blog.lisk.io/lisk-community-technical-meeting-summary-august-13th-c958b5f8b0fc#.lcmclrdoc

I see,thank you

Hi, great to see you on Steem, i hope we hear from you often on this platform. I recently watched an interview/ hangouts session you did with Tai Zen, it was very interesting and really helped update us on the current state of Ethereum Classic. One of the things you mentioned was that whilst Ether took its roots in the USA, ethereum classic gets much of its support from Eastern Europe and Russia, is Ethereum Classic looking to build on that relationship, maybe include the likes of India and China for potential investors and developers? Is that the direction Ethereum Classic is looking to haed towards considering the amount of support it has in those regions? Also do you think there's ever a chance of Ethereum Classic and Ethereum working together in terms of sharing the technology even if via licencing deals or could be see an apple Samsung patent fight ensuing in the future?

This is the details of the sharedrop http://coinour.com/index.php/the-bitshares-token-snapshot-for-peerplays-beginning-at-september-1/

Yep, really covered my question well and the potential deeper problem of Kingship :) will read up on material. Cheers

Wow, how am I hearing about this two years later!